In his preface to the Collected Poems (1968) Bunting acknowledges his debts to ‘poets long dead'. The list included Dante, Wordsworth, Whitman, Wyatt, Malherbe, Spenser and Firdosi. Writing to Zukofsky in the early 1950s, Bunting also refers to the influence of Lucretius and Horace as well as classicial Persian poetry (PBB 250). In the preface he adds: ‘but two living men also taught me much: Ezra Pound and in his sterner, stonier way, Louis Zukofsky. It would not be fitting to collect my poems without mentioning them.’ Bunting's association with Pound and Zukofsky would, at first sight, position the English poet firmly within a well-documented modernist tradition and the significance of his apprenticeship at the Ligurian ‘Ezruversity’ has been noted. Bunting's work appeared in the special Objectivist issue of Poetry 1931, whose theory was formulated in Zukofskys essay ‘Program: ‘'Objectivists'’ 1931'. Paying particular reference to the poetry of Charles Reznikoff, Zukofsky describes a process of ‘objectification’ in which the poem, now working against Romantic notions of self-expression, takes on the form of an object, solid and complete in itself. Although Bunting objected to Zukofskys theoretical programme by publishing an open letter in the Supplemento Letterario one can see how he was working towards a pragmatic theory of his own that acknowledges a rigorous need for poetic form. Such an approach steers his poetry away from unmediated personal utterance and reveals a sympathetic engagement with the modernist notion of ‘impersonality.

Bunting's indebtedness to Wordsworth, a poet for whom Pound had little sympathy, makes for a subtle and wider- ranging conversation and suggests that any account of Bunting's development as a poet needs to take English traditions into account. This is particularly germane when we come to discuss Briggflatts. Any critique of Bunting's poetic needs to measure the way in which he absorbed influences, including Persian influences, in order to fashion his own approach. Although Eliot chose not to publish Bunting's work in the 1950s because he felt it had too much of a Poundian imprint, it would be a mistake not to consider the limits of that influence. That Bunting was able to work within the traditions of English poetry, as well as take on board the experimental fiat of modernism, suggests a wider embrace that qualifies the modernist/anti-modernist division that hardened after the Second World War.